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£1m find by BBC's Antiques Roadshow expert

Expect an upsurge in attendances at car boot sales across the UK after Antiques Roadshow, the long-running BBC TV programme, values an item brought in by a member of the public at £1m for the very first time.The nature of the item that has been found and valued is a closely guarded secret until the show is broadcast tonight. The estimate was made by fine art expert Philip Mould, whose specialism will be known to diehard Roadshow fans, but to reveal it might give away the surprise. Mould broke the news to the item's lucky owners during the recording of the show at The Sage music and conference centre in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear last August. Although the owners knew it as valuable they were still left shocked. The owners are said to have 'gone a bit silent' when they were given the valuation, though they later insisted that they would not be parting with the object in question, which has been described as 'delicate'.One of the show's regular experts, who between them can see up to 15,000 items for each episode, Mould said: 'It's a great thrill to me that something produced in the last 15 years has broken the record for the most valuable item to ever have been on the show.'The Roadshow's previous most expensive valuation had been a collection of silverware that appeared last year at an event in Arundel, West Sussex. Recently a vase bought at a car boot sale in Dumfries for £1 was identified as a valuable Feuilles Fougères and later sold at auction for £32,450.The Antiques Roadshow, which has been presented by Fiona Bruce since Michael Aspel stepped down last year, has been inspiring people to search through their attics and rummage in jumble sales for more than 30 years and has seen a resurgence in viewing figures of late, with nearly nine million now tuning in on a Sunday evening.Previous presenters of the programme include Hugh Scully, Angela Rippon and Arthur Negus, and the show has been imitated by TV production companies around the world.The episode will be screened on BBC1 tonight at 7.15pm.BBCTelevisionHeritageguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Gospel according to Antony and the Johnsons

Antony and the Johnsons/ LSOBarbican, London EC2Antony Hegarty isn't what you'd call the complete performer, I think it's fair to say, though he is in fine voice - and what a voice, crystalline and plaintive, filling the sedate Barbican Hall tonight. But no, he could be in his own bedsit - the light off, singing in the dark. Yes, the dark! He is performing - you can just about see the odd flailing arm - but he's lost in himself, as though he's just got back from an unsuccessful night out and is consoling himself with a couple of weepy ballads before bed. The audience, after giving him a rapturous welcome, is reverent and watchful. No one thinks it odd that Antony is singing in the dark. He is the one. Behind him, the London Symphony Orchestra (and a small handful of Johnsons) labour studiously in their own little pools of light. Antony, large and ungainly (but hardly the Elephant Man - let's see him for goodness sake!), is wearing something long and diaphanous over his day clothes. Are those tracksuit bottoms? 'I got kissed by a turtle dove ... ' he sings, his hands enacting some private torment. Your heart goes out to him.We're three songs in before a chink of grey dawn appears. He stands merely shadowed now, black hair parted, his skin pallid, his expression effortful as he glides into 'Cripple and the Starfish', a majestic and poignant anthem about the unhelpful blindness of love in an abusive relationship. It's about having your fingers cut off and them growing again, like a starfish. It's about coming back for more. The strings are a little busier, the woodwind twiddling with menace. It's quite beautiful.The crowd, having sat through two unfamiliar works (this concert is one of a handful of autumn dates in which the band are previewing their third studio album, The Crying Light, due next January), responds with the sort of wildness you reserve for having something to be wild about. Antony, more at home now - or perhaps still at home, but in the glow of an open fridge - sings a flawless 'For Today I Am a Boy' from his flawless I Am a Bird Now album, his hands stroking the air. Apart from a murmured 'thank you' he is silent between songs, which ebb and flow with their own mini-dramas. Visually, you might want for more. Antony - alabaster in the half-light, like a statue of one of the bulkier Greek goddesses - is full of grace, but I'm afraid not in a physical way. My eyes roam the stage for novelty: the bass players banging their instruments during a rare tribal passage; the conductor shutting someone up with a sudden gesture. I did wonder how much of Hegarty's austere, visceral quality would survive the might of the London Symphony Orchestra tonight - or rather the arrangements of New York boy-wonder composer Nico Muhly, whose esoteric atonal 'soundscapes' (he has a day job working for Philip Glass) have been skittering round my iPod this week. 'He paints the sky with his work,' Hegarty has said, though I was still dimly expecting tapes of running bath water or someone frying eggs in a strong wind. There is the odd drone (at one point effectively reducing the three chords of a lovely new song, 'Another World', to one) but the orchestra is restrained joy itself. 'I fell in love with a dead boy,' Antony sings, with understandable concern, his arms reaching for the clouds, dry ice drifting like mist over a wet lawn.For most of us, Antony Hegarty swooped out of nowhere when he won the Mercury Prize in 2005 for the Bird album - descending from heaven itself, it seemed, judging by the terms in which his startling, tremulous vocal style (lauded to the skies as 'ethereal', 'sublime', 'transcendent') came to be described. Was this the 'Gay Messiah' as prophesied by Rufus Wainwright, 'reborn from 1970s porn'? He didn't quite fit the bill. He's not Freddie Mercury, or indeed Rufus, who cheerfully ends his own shows looking like he's stepped out of an Ann Summers window display.He is compelling, though: an androgynous, goth-haired, gentle man-boy giant who arrived with a starry siblinghood of disciples - Wainwright himself, Lou Reed ('When I first heard Antony I knew I was in the presence of an angel'), Björk, Boy George, arty pranksters Devendra Banhart and Yoko Ono all smitten collaborators. His sexual mystery and stoic aura of suffering, his New York drag-punk apprenticeship (though he was born in Chichester, West Sussex), his homage to fallen Warholian sirens Divine and Candy Darling, seemed calculated to excite an adoring gay following. But the Church of Antony is broader than that. His intimate, radiant songs may be autobiographical, with their cross-gender issues and talk of guilt or pain or hopes of growing up to be a beautiful woman ('I feel the power in me'), but they also speak more generally of struggle, suggest less specific sorts of hope. They have the core self-belief of devotional music - psalm-like sometimes, but more often gospelly and soulful, capturing the spirit of Nina Simone (Antony's big heroine), her jazzy vocal dips, her dignity; even, somehow, her moral authority. If Hegarty is not the light, he seems at least to have seen it. For his encore he finds his tongue and an endearing sense of humour to tell us the rambling story of a New York transvestite prostitute who used to throw tins of catfood at passing cars, but who drowned in the Hudson River. Antony named his band for her (she was called Marsha P Johnson) and wrote her a song, which he now sings. 'River of sorrow, don't swallow this time ... ' Now that is sublime.? Kitty Empire is awayAntony and the JohnsonsPop and rockguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds